I Know That You Know That I Know: Narrating Subjects from "Moll Flanders" to "Marnie." (review)

Abstract

278 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION17:2 a close and persuasive reading ofFrankenstein based on disentangling die few words spoken by William Frankenstein, the monster's first victim, Wild Enlightenment actually ends widi a welcome retrieval ofPeacock's Melincourt, which features the wonderfully named Sir Oran Haut-ton. Nash makes a good case for appreciating the topical radicalism of Melincourt, which, "positioned in a Romantic era but looking backward to Augustan models of satire and literary involvement in die public sphere, brings bodi sociability and language use centre stage in seeking to redefine the role of the responsible citizen" (187). WildEnlightenmentcan interestingly be compared widi Felicity Nussbaum's TL· Limits of tL· Human: Fictions ofAnomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (2003). Although their periods and general approach are close, die two books hardly overlap at all—only DrJohnson is a significant figure in both. However, both books bring new material into eighteenthcentury studies in exciting ways, demonstrating die relevance of the period to twenty-first-century concerns dirough careful attention to the historical background of the works diey discuss. Both books offer the very best of contemporary eighteenth-century scholarship. Peter Hulme University of Essex George Butte, IKnow That You Know That IKnow: Narrating Subjects from "Moll Flanders" to "Mamie. " Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. viii+270pp. US44.95. ISBN 0-8142-0945-9. In a pivotal scene from Austen's Persuasion, Captain Wentworth places a fatigued Anne Elliot into a carriage, and his delicacy implies he may yet have feelings for her. Worded dius, a simple enough action and implication—yet as George Butte adroidy demonstrates in IKnow That You Know That I Know: NarratingSubjectsfrom "MollFlanders" to "Mamie, "Austen's rendering is, in fact, considerably more intricate, suggestive, and skilful. Using an omniscient narrator to voice the heroine's consciousness, what die text actually represents is a series of reverberating perceptions in which Anne, grasping that Wentworth has noticed herweariness and reacted widi surprising tenderness, responds to her-sense-of-his-sense-of-herselfwidi a mix ofpleasure and pain. Wentworth speaks his part with "his will and his hands," and for Anne too, die exchange is about bodies as well as intentions (112-13) . IKnow That You Know looks to novels and films from Persuasion to Broadway Danny Rose for selves defined in such complex relational terms—characters and sometimes REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS279 narrators linked to odiers in a close economy of words, looks, and touch. This book does so in die service oftwo general claims. The first is historical: that widiJane Austen we see a shift towards stories newly able to narrate die kind of"deep intersubjectivity" illustrated above. Butte supports diis assertion widi illuminaüng comparisons of"before" and "after" novels: MollFlandersand GreatExpectations; Pamela and TL· Turn oftL·Screw, TomJonesand Middlemarch. The second claim is metacritical: diat French philosopher Merleau-Ponty— whose notions ofenmeshed subjects and embodied consciousnesses underwrite diis book—may serve not only to dieorize subjects in positive conjunction widi one anodier but also, in the process, to suggest a more historically situated phenomenology, revised away from its idealist origins. Butte is not, ofcourse, die first to identify late eighteendi-century England widi such new formations as a consolidated middle class, a modernized disciplinary regime, and—ofprimary importance here—a psychologized subject whose rich interiority is both produced and figured by die realist novel. This rather standard periodization nevertheless gives Butte occasion for some wonderfully sensitive and original readings. One is grateful to be shown, for example, the subdety and poignancy widi which Dickens depicts young Pip's endangered intimacy widiJoe: die boy's exquisite awareness of and constitution byJoe's view ofhim; his pained sense of die fragile, reciprocal nature of dieir ties; his unwillingness to confess his dieft, lestJoe's shifted perception of him—and his knowledge of that perception—be woven tiiereafter into every word, every movement between them (49-51). Butte poses diis in revealing contrast to Moll's undiscerning, largely mechanical relationships widi characters whom she apprehends only in die broadest generic terms as "die Wretch," "a Fop," "such Gendemen," or "a Man heated by Wine." Even the emotional transaction with her belovedJemy is, we are made to...